Doctor Who 2008: Sontarans cometh, RTD Ood 'ave 'im etc.

Why did Rose have to go back to her other timeline but Mickey was allowed to stay in this one?

Did she have to? I thought she wanted to be with her parents.

Wasn't she taken back to Bad Wolf Bay by The Doctor and Donna because the rift was closing again, and she didn't particularly want to go because she wanted to stay with the Doctor (as opposed to DoctorTwo who she got given as a present)

I may have missed some of the finer points through general hilarity and OH FUCK OFF-ness amongst my viewing companions.

Can someone remind me why a Norwegian beach is the gateway between universes?

It looks pretty in a desolate and lonely way.

It's where melody is the be all and end all.

It looks pretty in a desolate and lonely way.

-- Matt DC, Sunday, 6 July 2008 17:52 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

And conveniently enough like south Wales to make the filming cheap.

and is called Bad Wolf Bay. Real spoddy Who answer = it is the site of one of those rift thingies.

animated gifs are fun!

http://img371.imageshack.us/img371/5141/dalekpushpo8.gif

Also, turns out that Wilf's red cap wasn't SAS, but parachute regiment, and more than likely Cribbins' own.

His own!

aww.

I still don't know why people don't like the idea of Tennant and Piper pairing off. I think it's pretty OK.

Why were there German daleks anyway?

I would have imagined that you people who actually watch the programme would have understood that, unlike the likes of me.

ie. that you might have seen them before or something.

I think they were German because they were in Germany, pinefox.

I quite enjoyed it, but it was an ultimate cheese-fest. Didn't see the penultimate one so had no real sense of cliffhanger spoiled (and also as a non-regular Who watcher I don't really have anything invested in such things). Hated the Billie payoff, liked Davros and K9 and the Deutsche Daleks. I too wished he'd taken Cribbins (wasn't there a similar thing with another series/episode? An old guy wanting to be companion who he shuns?).

Mr copper in the Xmas special?

The German dalek thing seemed pretty tasteless to me. Where there skinhead redneck daleks in Kentucky?

Ed, I think you are correct.

forksclovetofu, why tasteless? They are in Germany, they need to have their cries of 'exterminate! Die, puny humans!' etc understood, so therefore they speak German. It just makes sense, especially as they had a human German character who did not default to speaking straight English.

Could they not get the rest of Martha's family back?

I cannot stand Martha's family. Just having to see her mother for a few minutes was too much.

digital subtitles (thanks red bee) had german lady say "Albtraum" for daleks

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albtraum

also: MAXIMUM POWER

and no pay off for the line in ep 12 "someone moved the earth before, but... no"

something for coming series? (esp when they discover all the timelords hiding 'saved' inside the matrix)

I thought that line was referring to an old Who story with the Daleks moving the Earth, wasn't it? I hear there was an old Time Lords story with the same gimmick, but I guess that wasn't the intention to allude to them, despite the hints that the Time Lords might come back (all the regeneration stuff, Doctor's Daughter, etc).

Or maybe it was an intentional swerve, since they did infact bring the Daleks out of the Time War, but they might be giving Davies and Co. too much credit. It doesn't sound like they really meant to make it THAT epic (no new Doctor), despite it being the end of his run. This episode did reflect Bad Wolf/S1's ending in a few ways, though.

"Tasteless" because it took place at Nuremberg to evoke the Nazi atrocities and nodding to the Holocaust to punch home the SERIOUS BIDNESS of a pepperpot invasion seems drastically inappropriate given the batty-nonsensical tact of this episode; I don't require every reference to the Nazis to come cloaked in solemnity, but this was some sub-"Life Is Beautiful" shit.

Further thoughts from this guy: http://lascribe.net/2008/07/06/61/

- “Exterminieren” as the German translation of “exterminate” — well. It’s a bit dodgy, but the word (like German equivalents of just about anything that’s a Latinate word in English or French) is in German dictionaries. Canonically you’d say “ausrotten“, but hell, “exterminate” would be unidiomatical English, too, for shooting a person (except if you’re a Dalek).

- It made sense that the Daleks would speak German in Germany. Contrary to what I’ve read online, their German isn’t grammatically incorrect (though it has an English accent). What they’re saying is “Exterminieren, exterminieren! Halt, sonst werden wir sie exterminieren. Sie sind jetzt ein Gefangener der Daleks.” (”Exterminate, exterminate! Stop, otherwise we will exterminate you. You’re now a prisoner of the Daleks.”) They use the formal “sie” as an address, which is weird, and isn’t as snappy as I’d expect Gestapo-Daleks to be, but it’s a fair stab at German. As for Martha’s German, it was fine and believable for an army-trained special-op.

- It did NOT make sense to label a place as “60 miles outside Nuremberg”. Dear Doctor Who team, go and look up the population density of Germany (almost identical to that of the UK on the average). A draw a sixty-mile circle around Nuremberg gets you half-way to Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Praha, Erfurt or Munich. The cities or major towns of Würzburg, Inglostadt and Regensburg lie right on the edge of the circle. Also, if you want to resurrect the Nuremberg-Nazi reference, “5 miles outside of Nuremberg” is far enough to find picturesque mansions inside spooky forests.

The Daleks were always meant to be a Nazi allegory, so I don't see a problem with it.

Also, that point about Nuremberg is otm. 60 miles would make sense in the Australian outback, maybe.

I couldn't stand Martha's family either but since they'd gone to the trouble of getting her mother back you'd think they could have got the rest of them back as well, or at least explained where they were. More hurt about lack of reference to Adam and shite explanation for no Pete, tbh.

Who gives a shit about any of those characters? Jesus.

No more Martha, please. I don't think I could stand any more of her non-acting.

Sorry that looks snappier than it's meant to be. But it's a bit like watching Lost for half a season and going "but where are Rose and Bernard eh?"

Pete would have been a better character to bring back than Jackie but both are kind of redundant from a plot point of view. Although I thought it was weakly implied that Mickey had been going to Jackie for, erm, what he couldn't get from Rose. There was something weird going on there anyway.

Rusty does! Explaining every little thing is his thing! also, doesn't everyone like Pete Tyler?

xpost obviously

Pete would have been less redundant than Jackie since parallel Pete was some kind of secret agent spy thing with connections to Torchwood, wasn't he?

Maybe, they've conveniently forgotten the whole 'evil Torchwood' thing though haven't they?

I only realised the problem with Freema today, she has very big eyes and doesn't have a clue what to do with them while acting. So when Martha is meant to be totally badass and in control she has this look of blind panic in her eyes, like she's been called to the front of the class and asked to explain a really hard sum.

True, I can't even imagine her being able to pull off badarse. Shame, really.

Well that was quite something - littered with deus ex machina and appallingly contrived narrative shortcuts (they blew up the Daleks by pressing some buttons!), it nonetheless crossed the finishing line a success, propelled by enthusiasm and sheer unhinged wackiness. Davros was magnificent, and Donna's fate was sadder than if she had died. Rose and Doctor II can stay the fuck out of my dimension, though. That's gonna turn into one screwed-up relationship.

Donna killing the Daleks was a season highlight. Utterly beautiful sequence. When she says 'that button there': spun gold. I must have watched it 15 times.

I too thought '60 miles from Nuremberg' was bonkers.

'ENGLAND, UK - 100 miles from Norwich'

'ISLE OF WIGHT, UK' - 100 miles from Milton Keynes'

Re: Torchwood... I think the UNIT/Osterhagen key thing continued the "humans are stupid when dealing with aliens and will kill everyone and themselves" theme they got across with Evil Torchwood. They even brought back Harriet Jones! I hope for TW S3 they bring back the sleeper agent race from that one-off story.

Damn, I totally hadn't thought much about that dialogue bit between Mickey and Jackie Tyler. That... was kind of odd. I definitely don't remember them having any particular special relationship earlier on. But Jackie had a baby with Earth-2 Pete, didn't she?

I know Martha isn't that great an actress, but I also think she hasn't been utilized well in the scripts since the end of S3. They've just made her a sort of generic soldier-type. I'm going to keep holding out vain hope that she'll pull a better turn later on...

I gotta say, I was a bit afraid when they announced Donna was coming on the season-long companion this year, because her character in Runaway Bride was sort of shrill and over-the-top comedy foil, but she's really done a nice job, especially coming through dramatically in the second half of the season (from Library on).

When the tardis is in the zed neutrino core or whatever the fuck, the same set of window implode, like thirteen times.

One thing a second viewing showed me was that for all the "movement", they left every character still on the table. Even Davros is likely due back next season!

> digital subtitles (thanks red bee) had german lady say "Albtraum" for daleks

surely Dalek is german for Dalek.

(albtraum would appear to translate as something like 'nightmare' from that wiki page)

(i also watched those two episodes of The Tomorrow People with young rodney trotter as a nazi yesterday, was something of a national socialist weekend.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/07/television.bbc

"It's a drama, he's a character with a full emotional range. It is a very science fiction thing to separate the plot off and dissect a story and talk about, I don't know, the 57 emotional lines spoken by the Doctor."

So Torchwood S3 is going to be Jack, Martha, Mickey and the other two then?

I hope mickey has been learning some l33t other universe computer skills otherwise otherwise rathe than replacing tosh he gets to take Ianto's old job of tea boy, receptionist and gimp.

That is the point of Mickey, everyone treats him as gimp for 40mins and then he pulls off something brilliant. I liked it when Ecclestone insisted on getting his name wrong for most of the series.

You saw the hug Jack gave him - he was probably sizing him up for a rubber hood.

I was a bit disappointed, overall, by that finale. Davros's big speech to the Doctor was good, but "he was forged in anger" was a far-too-easy route out of it. For that matter, the hybrid Doctor was used in a very odd way - created, flies the Tardis away from destruction, then ... well, he has to pop up every few minutes to be seen watching the action and say "ooh!", so we don't forget he's there. But that's all. And none of the Daleks notice!

There was another thing I didn't understand about that, too. As Davros said, the Doctor would have been able to feel if the Tardis had died. So equally the Doctor should have known that it had escaped. Why was he so surprised, then, when it reappeared? Did he realise that it had escaped, or not?

the Doctor looked a bit like he was faking it when he told Davros he felt sadness about the Tardis being destroyed, sort of implying he did realise it had escaped. and Rose gave him a funny look at that point too.

Yes, that's what I thought - but then he seemed genuinely surprised when it returned later.

The second Doctor running out of it might have been a bit unexpected as well.